8 comments:

Viewing and reflecting on this -- the poem and the pictures exist as a single integrated work for me (I think I figured out how you constructed this and I believe it's the most masterful job of improving by editing I've ever seen) -- at the start of morning is, as you can imagine, unsettling. It makes me want to look and reflect more, rather than launch my way into what might be an even more unsettling day. But it might be fine also. A lawyer's life is only apparently dull. Curtis

There’s a fine sense of dimensions in your poem Tom: a reflecting surface, then, sub-surface, everything that’s sunk out of sight—or so we thought. And the future, after a lifetime of unknowing, now presents itself with a disquieting certainty and clarity. Such feelings might be there in that startled look, or that disbelieving stare, on the faces of Marta’s subjects: the stark realization, yet again, that—shit!—time really does pass—and has passed—or at least leaves us with that all-too-convincing impression, against which we have no effective antidote. In many of Marta’s images there’s a flatness, a one-dimensionality, a dulled surface, often light-struck, showing the detritus of time and craft, and the inexorable abrading of the past. Memory wears out too. I share that ‘unsettled feeling’ with Curtis. Since childhood, August has always been for me a melancholy time. The cicadas sing in the evening, a sign that summer is dying away, along with much else . . .

Tom - Thanks for your reading of Dorota Marta's ghostly and beautiful Flickr stream. I lived in Warsaw for a few years in the early 90s and the images were certainly evocative, especially the final one of the shop window display with toilet paper, paper towels, and brushes. The ghostliest of them all, maybe.

Been poorly of late (O boy, Hazen, me too with the dog-days melancholy!), still amid the roundabout traffic swirl of fevers the conviction persists that these images are not discarded scraps at all, but bits of somebody's True Cross.

No that's not a rubbish heap there by the road to the Psychiatric Hospital, it's a gold mine. And those aren't cobwebs or chemical stains, it's faery dust. And rest assured, no flamingo was harmed in the making of this post.

Should more evidence be required -- and indeed we have one restless back-channel Doubting Thomas whose querulousness on this issue of the verisimilitude of the here palpably demonstrated Bi-Polish Genius cries out for appeasement --